NEWS ANALYSIS : Plan Unlikely to Ease Bosnian Muslims’ Plight

A repackaged peace plan heralded in Washington as a fresh attempt to halt the bloodshed in Bosnia-Herzegovina has papered over differences between Washington and European allies but is unlikely to ease the plight of the war-torn republic’s vanquished Muslims.

The measures announced by the United States, Russia and Western Europe amount to a retracing of steps already taken and proposals for containing the conflict that still have high hurdles to clear.

As Secretary of State Warren Christopher was working out the details of the latest Western initiative with his counterparts from Russia, Britain, France and Spain, the Serbian rebels who have already overrun 70% of Bosnia were continuing to pound the capital, Sarajevo, with heavy artillery fire. At least 12 were killed, and a deputy prime minister was among dozens injured.

Thus, while the international community delves into the time-consuming work of translating its diplomatic tongue-lashing into action, Bosnia’s defiant Serbs--emboldened by the outside world’s reluctance to stop them--may press on with their deadly drive to create an ethnically pure, independent state.

The most forceful action proposed by Christopher and his colleagues was the creation of “safe havens” in the few parts of Bosnia where Muslims still live and protection of those enclaves with U.N. troops and U.S. air power.

While the establishment of such refuges might spare the lives of those inside them, deployment of U.N. peacekeepers would have the effect of freezing the territorial status quo, allowing the Serbian gunmen to keep the land they have seized.

Some Western diplomats monitoring the Balkan crisis warn that creating safe areas has the unintended side effect of doing the Serbs’ dirty work for them: To make each area truly safe, U.N. troops would have to disarm those under their protection, while the rebels surrounding the protected areas would retain their tanks and guns.

Disarmed or not, safe areas also carry the potential to become breeding grounds for insurrection. Bosnia’s Slavic Muslims, who were the largest of the republic’s three ethnic groups, account for the vast majority of 150,000 dead or missing and 2 million displaced by the reviled practice of “ethnic cleansing.” They are increasingly bitter over the refusal of the world’s leading democracies to help them and are unlikely to peacefully submit to confinement on squalid and destitute reservations.

All but one of the cities under consideration for safe area status have been pounded into rubble since the Serbs took up arms against a March, 1992, vote for independence by Bosnia’s majority Muslims and Croats. Tuzla remains marginally functional due to its considerable industrial resources and little war damage, but Sarajevo, Bihac, Gorazde, Zepa and Srebrenica have been shattered by Serbian artillery, and their holdout residents are idle, often homeless and wholly dependent on foreign food aid.

Other actions proposed by Christopher and the Europeans appear fraught with uncertainty because they would require cooperation from the Serbs who are the targets of the measures.

A call for ensuring that Belgrade shuts down the arms and fuel pipeline to its proxy warlords in Bosnia seemed to back a Russian suggestion that U.N. troops be deployed on Bosnia’s eastern border. But the defiant leaders of what is left of Yugoslavia have already signaled their refusal to allow the stationing of foreign troops on the territory of Serbia and Montenegro.

Yugoslav President Dobrica Cosic, the nationalist writer considered the godfather of the Greater Serbia movement, was quoted Friday as saying that the presence of foreign troops would “put in jeopardy our sovereignty and our national dignity.”

When President Clinton earlier this month was pushing for air strikes against the Bosnian Serbs and military aid to the beleaguered Muslims, Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic appeared willing to work with the West to cut off support for the defiant rebels. But because those threats of force have been exposed as empty, Milosevic has little to fear if he fails to fulfill his promise to cease supplying the Bosnian Serbs.

Serbia can be expected to be even more defiant in the face of any attempts by the international community to station troops in its province of Kosovo.

Among the measures proposed by Christopher and the foreign ministers to keep the Balkan war from spreading were peacekeeping deployments to Kosovo and to the newly recognized republic of Macedonia.

The Macedonian leadership in Skopje is eager for Western protection, as it fears an imminent explosion of violence in neighboring Kosovo province, a part of Serbia, that could quickly spread to Macedonia and the rest of the Balkans.

Tensions between Kosovo’s ethnic Albanian majority and heavily armed Serbian security forces are at razor sharpness, and a provocation by either side could lead to a deadly confrontation that would draw Albanians from Macedonia and Albania to their Kosovo brothers’ side.

But the nationalists among the Serbian and federal leaders in Belgrade are widely expected to balk at any foreign troop presence in Kosovo.

Although Serbs make up less than 10% of the province’s 2 million population, they revere it as the heartland of their glorious medieval kingdom and the scene of their greatest battle, a deadly 1389 defeat at the hands of the Ottoman Turks.

Defusing the Kosovo time bomb would also deprive the nationalist leadership in Belgrade of a convenient diversion in the event Serbs begin fighting each other over the need to wage war in Bosnia or because of the social hardships imposed by U.N. sanctions.

The rest of the steps supported by the diplomats during their talks in Washington on Saturday amounted to reiterating their commitment to delivering humanitarian aid to the war’s victims, policing a “no-fly” zone in the little-used skies over Bosnia, continued efforts at negotiating a settlement and setting up a war crimes tribunal.

While the latest attempt to bring peace to Bosnia appeared unlikely to curb Serbian aggression or improve life for the beleaguered Muslims, it served to heal a diplomatic rift that resulted when Clinton pushed for tough moves against the Serbs that the Europeans were unwilling to take.

The quandary over how to stop the Serbian land grab that has been killing, wounding and displacing Bosnian civilians for 14 months had driven a wedge between Washington and European allies.